For many manual workers, life in Victorian London was a mean, hard grind. There wasn’t much relief from the daily routine of work and making enough money to survive. South of Canterbury Road as far as Carlton Vale, many Kilburn streets were lined with terrace houses rented out room by room and occupied by several families. It was a poor, deprived district, and the temporary blurring of reality that alcohol provided was a popular way to forget your problems. But drink too heavily and there could be trouble.
A Troublesome Woman and a Brute of a Husband
This neighbourhood and nearby Kilburn High Road were well populated with public houses that were much frequented by locals. If the weather permitted, you left your cramped room and went on the street, adults and kids alike, with the pub an important focus of social life.
Fights in and outside these establishments have featured in several of our blog stories, but this time we are concentrating on just one couple, Richard and Ann Gosling. Richard had the dubious distinction of assaulting at least twenty-four named policemen as well as many more whose names are not recorded, but who came to their assistance. Newspaper reports described four or five constables were needed to drag Richard to the police station, kicking and blaspheming all the way. Injuries sustained in the line of duty when they tackled Gosling, were sufficiently severe to merit a mention in the official records of two officers.
Who were Richard & Ann Gosling?
Richard was born in Neasden on 11 November 1853 and his parents Frederick and Emily had him baptized that December. Frederick was a labourer and came from Norfolk. The family moved to Kilburn, where Emily died in February 1866 at 20 Bridge Street, having suffered from TB for two years. Bridge Street was a narrow road running out of Kilburn High Road, behind the east side of Oxford Road.
By 1871, Frederick’s new address was 7 Canterbury Mews near the Canterbury Arms pub in Canterbury Road, where he was sharing his home with four of his children born locally, but no Richard. In July 1872, Richard claimed he was living at his father’s address when he was up in court charged with causing a disturbance, but when he married Ann Callaghan a few months later, the certificate says he was elsewhere, further up Canterbury Road at 3 Canterbury Yard.
Ann’s family roots were Catholic Irish. The 1871 census shows she was born in Middlesex in 1857 and was living with an aunt in Uxbridge. When she married Richard in the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Quex Road, her address was 6 Cambridge Road.
It’s unlikely either Richard or Ann was in regular work; in court, he gave his profession as labourer or bricklayer while she described herself as an ‘ironer’, presumably employed by the day at one of several laundries in the Kilburn and Willesden area, as was her sister Bridget.
Richard and Ann had at least one child, Richard Patrick born on 9 December 1873. Ann registered the birth and gave her address as 104 Denmark Road.
Court appearances
There are too many repetitive incidents involving the couple to recount them all. Generally, their drunken and violent behaviour ended in a magistrate’s court appearance, followed by a fine or imprisonment. In April 1889 the Kilburn Times reported Richard had upwards of 25 convictions, several involving hard labour, the longest for 15 months. Ann features at least sixteen times in the local press, accused of theft, drunkenness, and assault. Described by the magistrate as ‘very bad characters’, in 1880 Ann was with her sister Bridget when they kicked and knocked senseless a woman who neither knew; this unprovoked attack in Edgware Road earned them six weeks hard labour.
Ann and Richard had an on-off relationship, with life interrupted by their regular prison sentences. He was convicted of assaulting her (1879, 1881) and she attacked the woman he was living with (1886), but she also defended him when he was being arrested. The police were seen as the enemy and their attempts to arrest anyone who was drunk or violent could descend into a brawl, with the crowd attacking the police and trying to rescue the detainee.
Richard was a powerful looking man, who made full use of fists, teeth and above all, his hobnail boots, to inflict serious and permanent damage. Police sometimes removed his boots to reduce the injuries they received. Witnesses said that in his ‘fighting drunk’ mode, Gosling resembled a wild beast.
Richard’s most cowardly attack was on a mentally handicapped young boy who blacked boots on Kilburn Bridge, (1875). He refused to pay ‘Billey the Shoeblack’ the penny and hit him so hard he fell to the pavement. His punishment was a heavy fine of £5 (worth about £500 today) or two months – it is not a surprise that he was imprisoned.
Five police officers kicked, beaten and bitten
It was 19 October 1883 when Richard was up before the Marylebone magistrates and committed for trial at the Middlesex Sessions. This was by far his most serious offence yet, involving an assault on five police officers. Around 9pm on the 14th, PC Henry Townsend was called to Kilburn Lane where he attempted to arrest Richard. Drunk and using abusive language, Richard’s response was predictable – he threw Townsend onto the pavement, kicked him in the body and head, and for good measure, bit his hand. Four more officers were needed to get Richard to the police station, and all required immediate medical attention. Sergeant David Eatherley had 14 wounds on one leg inflicted by Richard’s hobnail boots, with another wound, one and a half inches wide, on the other leg. Eatherley’s and Townsend’s injuries appear on their official police record.
At his trial in November, Richard laughed as the evidence was given. His assaults on Eatherley and Townsend were described, and the court was told that Sergeants William Loveday and James Badcock, and PC Charles Sloper had all sustained severe kicks to the head and legs. The jury found Richard guilty and he was sentenced to 15 months hard labour at Cold Bath Fields Prison. ‘As the prisoner was passing down the steps from the dock he called out, “It ought to have been a fifteen stretch (15 years)”.
Knife attack
The only occasion we have found Richard using a weapon other than his boots was in 1885. After he refused to leave the Admiral Nelson pub in Carlton Vale, the landlord Frederick Dickie and his barman tried to throw him out. Richard stabbed the landlord in the hand several times, then hit him over the head with the closed knife, blows hard enough to break through his hat, and finally, punched him on the nose. In court Richard claimed he acted in self-defense, but the magistrate called it a ‘violent and unprovoked assault’ and sentenced him to two months hard labour. 
Admiral Nelson, 93 Carlton Vale (now demolished)
What happened to Richard and Ann?
Richard ceases to feature in Kilburn news reports after 1891 when the census records a Richard Gosling working as a labourer and living in a lodging house at 268 Kilburn Lane with an astonishing total of 40 people. It’s almost certainly him, as he gives ‘Kilburn Lane’ as his address in two contemporary court appearances, but bizarrely his birthplace is shown as Spain! Mentions of Ann linger on until 1898 but we don’t know what happened to her after that. Richard Gosling died in August 1894 aged 41, at 30 Bridge Street. He had been suffering from bronchitis for 10 days aggravated by pleurisy.
South Kilburn before and after WWII
These streets continued to slowly decline. Pathe News has three short films from February 1938, showing the same condemned houses being deliberately set on fire in Alpha Mews, close to the present Kilburn Park Underground Station. Willesden Fire Brigade poured paraffin on bales of wood chippings inside the houses and then set them alight. Part of a clearance scheme, it was seen as a way to destroy the bugs that infested the properties, which were in turn consumed by the flames. The planned demolitions were halted by WWII.
In 1949 ‘The Willesden Survey’ carried out by Willesden Borough Council, featured ‘The South Kilburn Redevelopment Scheme’. This included the remains of Alpha Mews and covered much of the area that was home to Richard and Ann, enclosed by the mainline railway (N), Carlton Vale (S) and Kilburn High Road and Maida Vale (E).
It was very run down, ‘due for immediate development…the most blighted and overcrowded area in the Borough’ with most properties still in multiple occupation.
Described as ‘obsolete housing’, the survey records that as many as 18 people were living in a single house. Albert Road ran parallel to the railway, from a junction with Salusbury Road, via Canterbury Terrace to meet Canterbury Road. The last building on the far right with the stone pediment, is the Albert Edward pub.
Little had changed so far as the number of public houses was concerned; there were 10, all premises Richard and Ann will have known, with the official estimate of one pub to every 750 persons in the area, compared with one to every 4,500 persons in all of Willesden. The plan was to reduce the number of pubs.
The actual 1960s redevelopment redrew the street plan, wiping many roads off the map and reducing the number of public houses to just three.
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